Joakim Ohlrogge DECEMBER 2008 KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Joakim Ohlrogge is the keynote speaker for the 5th December 2008 AgileMalta conference that will be held at the Hilton Hotel Conference centre.

Joakim is one of four founders of Agical, a consulting company in Sweden. Since it was founded in 2005, Agical has been focusing on high quality software development using Agile methods.

Joakim has been working with software development since 1994, with the first Agile project 2002 (though they did not call it that). In retrospect that project was a turning point for Joakim, who then started to realize the power of small, high productivity teams with close customer contact.

Since then Joakim has been involved, among other things, in introducing Scrum as the development method of choice in a large Swedish/Japanese company in the telecom business. Deployed working software every second week in a large, mission critical SOA middleware solution using a highly automated build and deploy process.

As one of the developers of the interaction-based testing framework rmock, he helped with multiple TDD introductions.

Joakim is often a speaker on Agical’s appreciated Geek Nights, a monthly event where the topic is often a technical one.

At Agila Sverige 2008, a conference held by Agile Sweden, Joakim talked about a common way TDD-introductions fail or deliver unsatisfactory results. Joakim also talked about his experience of how to build successful teams, a topic he had the chance to revisit at XP2008 in the form of an open-space event.

Joakim’s interest for people has seriously started to compete with his passion for technology but he can’t imagine ever giving up programming, he does not have a wish to only do management or coaching but enjoy the latter a lot.

A topic Joakim is currently very interested in and has some positive hands on experience with is combining maintenance work and developing new functionality in product (not project) teams. That interest naturally leads to the exploration of iterationless-agile and Joakim now attends any kanban-talk he can find.

In his spare time Joakim can’t let go of his technical interest and is currently exploring Scala programming language, from a Java perspective on his blog http://johlrogge.wordpress.com

Of course, all is not technology; privately there is also Jelena, his wife, three cats and more orchids than he is keeping count of.